How your employees interact with one another has a huge impact on the cooperation, teamwork and success that teams experience. Poor behavior, bullying and employee infighting lead to a large number of problems, including a decreased quality of work, lower employee morale and slower response times. By implementing proven team building strategies, leaders can create stronger bonds among their employees, which results in greater collaboration and success within the organization as a whole.

For team building strategies, this article references the following resources:

• Work With a Jerk? Here’s How to Handle It,
• The 10 Perks of an Amazing Workplace,
• Set these 3 boundaries for a sane balance of work and life
• Workplace sanity is within reach.

Organizations can create a culture of collaboration with proven team building strategies.

Implement a zero-tolerance policy. In order to create a positive work culture, leaders need to implement official policies, states Work With a Jerk? Here’s How to Handle It. Leaders should implement a zero-tolerance policy against bullying, and leaders and team members alike need to address issues head-on as they arise. The policy needs to clearly state which behaviors are unacceptable so that all team members understand the rules, as well as the repercussions.

Get rid of the gossip. According to The 10 Perks of an Amazing Workplace, a great workplace does not allow gossip. Gossip falls along the same lines as bullying, and team members should understand that gossip is not a solution and it is not tolerated. Rather than spread rumors, employees should meet with one another and resolve their issues as they arise.

Encourage employees to leave their work at work. A healthy work/life balance is an important aspect for employee success in the workplace, according to Set these 3 boundaries for a sane balance of work and life. To help achieve work/life balance for employees, leaders should encourage their employees to leave their work at work. This also includes allowing employees to be off the clock. Emergencies aside, leaders should respect their team members’ personal time and not call, email or text their team members after hours, and if they do, they should not expect a response.

Be proactive. Creating a collaborative work environment requires leaders to be proactive and to eliminate negative factors within their working environments, states Workplace sanity is within reach. Unhappiness within the workplace stems from a number of factors, including unsupportive management, dissatisfaction with other team members and poor internal systems, among others. To combat these issues, leaders need to place employee happiness higher on the importance scale and engage with their team members to understand what is working and what needs to change.

Focus on the six principles. The six principles of trust, interdependence, genuineness, empathy, risk and success are vital for an organization’s success, and leaders should focus on building teams with these principles in mind. For example, one of the advantages of the TIGERS® Team Wheel™ Activity is that both employees and their leaders learn about behaviors that build trust, interdependence, genuineness, empathy, risk and success and behaviors that will predictably tear those six team principles down. Then through consensus, the team identifies behaviors they prefer going forward and those behaviors that are unacceptable. This develops what is referred to as a behavior contract or group norms of behavior that then can be brought into the employee handbook with accompanying statements of correction procedure. The agreement can also be used for employee onboarding and for project team development.

With The 6 Principles that Build High Performance Problem Solving Teams Leadership Clinic, leaders can learn to better manage their teams by addressing organizational difficulties, clearly defining goals and helping team members to understand their roles within the team.

A culture of collaboration is important for an organization’s success, and all leaders on all levels should focus on creating this type of environment for all employees through proven team building tactics. All team members should leave bullying and gossip out of the workplace, and leaders should implement and enforce policies along these lines. Leaders should also be proactive, focus on the six principles and strive to create a favorable work/life balance for all team members.

Copyright TIGERS Success Series, Inc. by Dianne Crampton

About TIGERS Success Series, Inc.

TIGERS Success Series is a Bend, Oregon Team Development Consultant that helps leaders build cooperation among employees and collaboration between departments. We have been doing this for over two decades providing diagnostics and customized team interventions for committed leaders and their teams.  In October we are crowd funding to take our diagnostics to an all new level. For a preview of the rewards given in this campaign, click the link on the left.